Acrobat 8 adds extra characters to the running header

I would like to report that at our company we have this problem exactly as reported by Peter Clay and others--but only with one writer! Two of us convert fine, bookmarks look normal, but the third writer has the little unwanted numbers (and letters, they appear as "u" before and after headers and text in the TOC too). If ADD BOOKMARKS is unbchecked, no numbers, but also no bookmarks. There is no way we can add bookmarks manually when every doc is updated.

We all have the same versions of Word 2003 (11.8169.8172 SP3) and Acrobat Pro (8.1.1) on pretty new hard drives. I believe there could be another check box that has somehow become checked or unchecked, but if so, we cannot find it.

Our poor third writer with the issue is now reloading Acrobat in hopes that will fix it, but based on this thread, I doubt it.

Adobe needs to understand that without bookmarks, tech writers cannot use their Acrobat application. If someone has secret knowledge of how to fix this, please share.

It has now been one year since this bug has been reported. Many people use Running Headers in their documents and need to generate bookmarks. This issue needs to be solved by Adobe, but they really don't seem to care. This problem is still present in 8.1.1. This is a major issue as it happens on almost every page. Is someone at Adobe going to fix this issue. I work at a large company - how about some support or do we have to go to another company. Someone said that Microsoft now has a free product. If so, I will do my best to convince the company I work for to switch! I reported this issue last year about this time, called Adobe, but they don't seem to care...

Here is a sample from my Chapter 3 Document:

2BService and Features

Harold, I don't see this problem when styleref refers to a Heading.
As mentioned in your message I tried creating such a word file but couldn't reproduce any extra character issue with footer.
The only scenario when I could see the problem was when my 'Header/Footer' toolbar was ON and I converted the file to PDF. Turning the toolbar OFF before running PDFMaker solved the problem.

Can you share your word and PDF files with us. I think we can find some workaround here by looking at your file.

Just did the 8.1.1 upgrade, no effect on our sample file.

TO REPEAT:

Posting here because our writing team has run into this specific problem, but it's at least partially related to a general problem with Acrobat 8 in Windows. We're currently using Acrobat 8.1 with Framemaker 8 and Office 2003 under Windows XP, will be transitioning to Vista and Office 2007 soon. We're seeing similar general problems with Office and Framemaker.

Comments on the general set-up problem:

Make sure the source app, the printer driver, and Acrobat are all set up the same way. This always has to be done, but it seems to be crucial for the Acrobat 8 upgrade.

Go to the printer and faxes link on the Start menu and right-click Adobe PDF. You can probably use another postscript driver, but the Adobe driver puts out clean postscript, and it's Vista-compatible (the Universal Postscript driver isn't yet) so it's preferred.

Set it up for whatever PDF settings you normally use. We generally use the default high-quality print settings.

Open the file in Word or Framemaker and make sure it's set up to print using Adobe PDF, then make sure the app is using the same settings for PDF conversion as the printer. We generally set Adobe PDF as the default printer. You may have to do this for all the legacy documents you open.

Comments on numbers in Word headers and footers:

The numbers appear to be hidden characters related to STYLEREF fields that are being sent to the Distiller as printing characters. They count up by section, so they are likely to be identifiers or tags of some kind. Acrobat 7 doesn't exhibit this behavior with the same source applications and files, so it could be an Acrobat 8 filtering or translation function that isn't working properly. However, printing directly to Adobe PDF or printing to Postscript and then distilling makes the numbers go away. This is similar to other known Acrobat 8 problems with handling hidden tags in files, and indicates a Word/PDFMaker interaction could be involved.

In one document that exhibited this problem, all of the STYLEREF fields in the footers except those in one section referred to the "heading 1" style and picked up leading numbers when distilled. The actual style name, "Heading 1", was used in the one section that didn't exhibit the problem. Correcting the references by capitalizing the "H" in the other sections made all the leading numbers in the PDF go away. Most of the STYLEREF fields in the document were lower-case-only, but only those with multiple instances (each footer referred to a different Heading 1) exhibited the problem. The lower-case STYLEREFs distilled correctly from Word 2003 with Acrobat 7, and other documents that have STYLEREFs with correct style references throughout seem to distill correctly when Acrobat 8 and the source app are set up as described above.

This problem is impacting our productivity in a big way. If anyone has more particular information, or has a clue about a workaround, we'd certainly like to hear about it. The lack of response from Adobe is making us consider using XPS.

What's the deal? I posted a detailed message about this problem and received a request to post an example file. Now both my original message and the response are gone.

Thanks for the idea, Mkashif, but I always create fully functional (FF) PDFs. The quick and simple PDF option does not allow you to create bookmarks from Word styles. Since I need that feature, I use the FF setting. And yes, the problem is tied to the making of bookmarks, as other comments in this thread have indicated. --GMc

I think I know what might have fixed it for Gloria. In Word 2007 when you try to convert a file to PDF using Acrobat 8.1 then in the save as dialog there are two options 'Fully Functional PDF' and 'Quick and Simple' PDF. The problem seems to be with 'Fully Functional' only, 'Quick and Simple' route works fine for me.

You can set Quick and simple as default route by going inside Word's 'Acrobat' ribbon -> 'Preferences'.

These options are present only for Word 2007 and not with earlier versions of Word. Please let us know if something if this is not the case Gloria.

One of my posts was lost during the "great forum 'upgrade' disaster." I cannot offer a solution re: STYLEREF, but wanted to report for the record: The problem has disappeared on my system - my headers are now generated correctly, without the goofy characters. I did nothing; it just stopped. Perhaps there was a minor Office or Word update that occurred in the background? Just don't know. My Word vers. is "Word 2007 (12.0.6015.5000) MSO (12.0.6017.5000)/Part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007." --GMc

I have been running examples in a WinXP SP2, Word 2003 SP2 environment.

I have upgraded to Acrobat 8.1 but it appears that PDFMaker still add characters to my STYLEREF based running header. I need PDFMkaer to convert very large .doc/.rtf files into PDF with bookmarks, so turning off bookmark is not an option for me.

Will Adobe advise when they are going to fix this problem?